"For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands
for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the
video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been
shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last
year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or
any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players.
Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the
lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has
finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be
thinking..."